So What?

Yep, eating ice cream outta the dang bucket with two spoons, yet another set of Emotional Twins here at home, Dubs and Martin have been best buds since they met nearly 13 years ago here at my house. CW'd toddled down the hall, just learning to walk, to greet the scared new almost four year old. They've been inseparable. They've been delightful, even as teenagers, but clearly Martin didn't want photographic evidence of his pigging out ice cream event.

"Really?" I asked in disbelief when another, much less genial teenager, Jonathan, called me last night, "You're acting perfectly there?"

"Yes ma'am," he replied.

"Why can't you do that good at home?"

"Because y'all irritate me."

Yep, I believe it. It's drilled in him to make mama proud, apparently just outside the home, as he's being courteous and strangely obedient in a psych facility, yet this abnormally perfect behavior will get him released before he's ready, sent back home to attack the younger ones.

It totally illustrates my point though, without familial demands, even minimal family safety issues, not now weighing down upon him, well Honey, he can live this superficial existence just fine. He's the youngest there in an age group 13-16. If he were still 12 and then the oldest in the group, I doubledawg guarantee you he'd be bullying someone, acting inappropriately, and raging when redirected.

Back here at home, I'm wondering who are all these delightful children who vied last night for the best test grades ever, shoving 100s (grades, not bills) in my face, telling me compliments from teachers, yep, this is how I'd once imagined my life to be.

Even at soccer practice for Nando, all the older boys got another wild soccer game going on the back field with their friends while Tabby and Jack used their scooters to follow after me on my own three mile walk at the park. It hit 100 degrees yesterday, down to 95 by the time we walked, but there's nothing 'bout sweating that I don't like.


I'd gotten to spend all day home alone, gate remain locked, some two hours spent up in my overly leafy room watering house plants, pruning back a bit, later I worked hard downstairs, so easy to do when folks aren't following me around trashing everything, indicating their extreme displeasure at having been adopted which dashed their original hopes and plans for an imaginary family reunion.

Yeah, I'd be mad too if I were them.

I added Suze Orman's podcast to my listening list, heard many of the Dave Ramsey ones that I'd not listened to all summer, what with kid demands on me 24-7, and I also like Dr. Joy Browne's podcast, a radio psychologist. I added some more personal finance blogs to my Google Reader after hearing The Simple Dollar guy say he reads about 100 of them a day. This one about not using credit cards spoke to me today. I do have a credit card I've not yet cancelled, maybe today's the day for that.

I'll just call 1-800-Quit-Ripping-Folks-Off and delete my own self.

I finished reading David Bach's Start Over, Finish Rich: Ten Steps To Get You Back on Track in 2010 book that I'd bought for a quarter at a yard sale, and I tinkered with our own budget, trying to get through August. We shut down the pool, it's expensive to run that dern pump, but we're on the soccer field every night of the week, no time to swim. You can buy Bach's book for $1.99 here or, duh, get it for free at the library.

So stress less. Is this how normal people live? I could so enjoy this lifestyle. Boring? A book reading nerd who seeks out solitude? So what?

Someone from Grandma's church sent me the photo of Grandma working at an unairconditioned warehouse on her missions trip, south of New Iberia, Louisiana, a place I remember puttering around in with a friend many years ago, happy as a clam that day, learning about growing sugar cane and blissfully not knowing the trauma that was waiting for me in the next decades.

If I were Grandma, I'd rather be toiling in the fields than to be stuck inside all day. She's the one in the white shirt not looking like she's 81 years old.

Today also is mine, all mine.

That's paradise to me. Solitude, options, horticultural pursuits, I don't wanna go anywhere, don't want any meetings or other obligations, don't ever want to run errands, I just want to slink around here and choose which chore to do.

I'd bought a push reel mower for five bucks, I'm gonna use it around the fenced in garden acre, nonpolluting noise or fuels, using muscle power versus having to join a gym where I couldn't dress all raggedly and I'd have to make small talk. No, thank you..

The dishes are done, I'm almost caught up on laundry, the house has been picked up already, and I'm gonna ignore the serious drought and pretend I still have more gardening options than what the reality of dry-as-a-bone dirt might suggest.